DONNA BRAZILE: US must stay clear of Iraq conflict

Twice this nation has gone to war with Iraq. We poured at least $21 billion into reconstruction, and billions more into military training and equipment for the Iraqi army. We had a civilian police force training program touted as the “most ambitious” since the Marshall Plan, the U.S. aid program that rescued Europe after World War II.

Three weeks ago, 800 members of the terrorist organization ISIL, plus associated groups, took Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. The Iraqi army units of 30,000 men guarding Mosul panicked. Senior officers threw down their arms, stripped off their gear in the streets and ran. The army followed.

McClatchy newspapers interviewed an Iraqi army private first class by phone from his hometown where he’d had fled. He compared his division’s actions with the bravery of U.S. troops he had fought with in Fallujah. It wasn’t the way the U.S. trained him.

“I fought side by side with Americans,” the private said. “Their military has leaders that tell the soldiers what the plan is, and fight. We don’t.”

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It can be said with certainty that while the Iraqi army had expert training and the best equipment, its collapse was due to poor morale and Iraqi civilian leadership.

Enter ISIL. It has been described by Ryan Crocker, our former ambassador to Iraq, as “al-Qaida on steroids.” That gives them too much credit, I believe. Thickheaded on steroids, rather.

Who are they? I turned to published backgrounders by scholars and terrorist experts: Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, and Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

ISIL is a fanatical organization that, until February, was “al-Qaida in Iraq” until al-Qaida kicked them out -- for extremism. ISIL cuts off the hands of thieves. Until recently, ISIL had an automatic execution policy for Muslims who differ with their interpretation of Islam. They literally use crucifixion for some executions.

The group will fight alongside people with whom they disagree, but they will never let them rule with them. “ISIL doesn’t submit to the will of anyone -- not even al-Qaida for that matter,” Zelin says. This is keenly important because the forces now sweeping across Iraq are composed of multiple groups. Lister says it is a de facto Sunni uprising. Hassan Hassan, a research associate with the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi, independently says the same.

To gain the cooperation of the Sunnis and some former Baathists (Saddam Hussein’s former ruling party), ISIL adopted a “soft” approach recently. They let apostates repent rather than kill them on the spot. They have, Zelin reports, even opened a consumer protection office in Mosul. But none of that means they will share power or abandon one iota of their religious dogma.

The group’s aim is to create a brand-new sovereign nation, composed of major parts of both Iraq and Syria. That’s been the planning for at least two years. Before its military push, it held about $2 billion, according to the Britain’s Guardian.

They’ve added significant money from the banks they’ve captured in several cities, in addition to attacking an oil refinery. They are now likely the richest terrorist organization in the world, and they’ve done this apparently without the aid of any nation-state.

ISIL is extremely skilled with social media networks, using Twitter this week to distribute pictures of mass killings of 1,700 Iraqi army prisoners. In short, ISIL will be anyone’s companion as long as anyone is useful -- but never, ever, anyone’s ally.

ISIL is a unique catalytic that prompts al-Qaida and other Syrian rebel forces to fight together; that compels Turkey to consider the uniting of Kurds in Turkey and Iraq; and nudges the United States and Iran to explore what joint efforts they can make against ISIL.

Foreign policy analysts are near unanimous that it was President Maliki’s Shiite government’s suppression of Sunnis and Kurds that facilitated and fostered ISIL and its partners -- groups that are to ISIS what male mates are to black widow spiders.

ISIL hopes to fan Shiite-Sunni divisions across the Middle East. So this begs the question, what role should the U.S. play in resolving this crisis?

President Obama is working to condition U.S. support on real changes by the Shiite government in Baghdad. There is no “winning” this battle without real political reform.

Republican members of Congress who are Iraq War veterans are urging caution in redeploying American troops. Retired Gen. David Petraeus, the former U.S commander in Iraq, says the U.S. cannot become the Shiites’ air force against the Sunnis. He’s right.

President Obama is seeking change that will heal the fracture ISIL has exploited. He’s demanding a new government without Maliki as a condition. Clearly Iran will oppose such an arrangement. But what are the other options? Allow the country to break into three parts, as Vice President Joe Biden suggested way back in 2006?

It takes nerves of steel while under immense pressure to require that Iraq make necessary political changes to heal the rifts created by the lack of political leadership in easing sectarian strife. Without putting American troops in harm’s way again, the president announced that he would be sending 300 military advisers to help the Iraqi security forces address the threat of ISIL. This is a far better approach than the shock and awe of former Vice President Dick Cheney and ever-fist-pounding interventionism of Sen. John McCain.

The last thing the U.S. should do is to go back to war in Iraq. Let’s see if the Iraqis can put down the revolution they started by alienating their own people.

Donna Brazile is a Democratic Party strategist and commentator for CNN.